A Decade On…

I turned thirty this year, and uncharacteristically for me I both spoke about it and celebrated it a little bit. In the course of reflecting on leaving my twenties, I thought about some of the things I’d done over the last few years, and it turned out there were a lot of them.

As the end of the year creeps closer I always find myself reflecting on what I’ve done over the last twelve months and what I might like to do over the next twelve. However, in the words of Bill Gates, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” I really saw this clearly when I looked back over the last decade: there were a few patches of time in which I felt I wasn’t doing much, or moving forward with my life, but when I reflected on the decade as a whole I realised how much I’d got done.

Then John Scalzi posted a 20/20 series over on Whatever, his excellent blog, and I thought I’d pinch adapt it and do some similar reflecting on my life over the last ten years. Also I’ve been a bit rubbish at posting regularly recently, so hopefully this will get me back into the swing of things.

You can read Scalzi’s 20/20 posts here; I’ll be adapting some of them that don’t really apply to me (‘New York’, ‘Presidents’ and ‘Fame’, for example) and keeping some the same.

What am I expecting from this? I don’t know, really: in some ways I’ve changed, and in some ways I’ve stayed the same. When I was in my early-mid 20s I spent a lot of time feeling like I wished I was myself in the way I had been when I was a teenager. Not that I was nostalgic for my teenage years, which were difficult, but I felt like I wasn’t myself anymore, because of the lifestyle I was living and the things I wasn’t doing. My late 20s saw a return to selfhood, which makes me very happy, and I think this will probably be reflected in the… well, in the reflections.